A lot of things have changed about football since Eamon Dunphy wrote Only A Game, his diary of the 1973-74 season as a Millwall player, but his entry for 24 August remains essentially the same.

It was the day before the first game of the season. "A very special day for football people," as Dunphy put it. "More than anyone, the pro dreams tonight. No matter how long you have been in the game, how cynical you have become, or how terrible you know your team to be, you push the past and present behind to dream of the future. Which, for you, is nine months long."

Michael Owen had his dreams once. Maybe he still does, although it is not always easy to be sure. But there was certainly a time when Owen spent his pre-season thinking of this moment, convinced that the dreams could become reality, and possessing the raw ability to make the rest of us think it, too.

He did not tend to do too badly on the opening weekend of the season, either. In 1997, aged 17, he scored the goal that spared Liverpool from losing to Wimbledon. The following year, he got the winner against Southampton. In 2001, Owen scored both goals in a 2-1 defeat of West Ham. He got another, in 2003, against Chelsea. Right arm in the air, that sunrise of a smile.

Not so much recently, though. Owen has not once started on the first weekend in the eight seasons since Liverpool sold him to Real Madrid, which is a fairly accurate gauge of the helter-skelter nature of his career. For the latest resumption, he does not even have a club, training by himself, waiting for the telephone to ring. Nothing has materialised since Manchester United ushered him to the door. The "no vacancies" signs have gone up and if that is still the case on 1 September, when the Premier League clubs submit their 25-man squad lists, he could be excluded until the end of the January transfer window.

There is no pleasure to take from seeing a footballer of Owen's achievements in this position, but the truth, unfortunately, is that it is not always easy to sympathise when there is also this lingering suspicion that, at some unspecified point, we are talking here about someone who has fallen out of love with football.

Owen, now 32, will always be revered as one of the more accomplished strikers England has ever produced but everything that is good is now spoken about in the past tense and the question here is whether it is his appetite for the sport, rather than his fitness or form, that is the issue and, if so, whether the people in his industry have simply cottoned on.

No footballer wants to be accused of lacking devotion but it is a valid question when there are people within Owen's circle who freely admit he wants to work because he needs money for his horse racing empire at Manor House Stables.

Owen's priority is to remain in the north-west, just as he once used to travel by helicopter to Newcastle United's training sessions. He has already stated that he would not consider dropping into the Championship, even though it would mean the chance to play regularly, injuries permitting. He was a bit-part player at Manchester United but said he preferred being at a big club to a mid-sized one even though it meant – and this is the bit that is not always easy to comprehend – no actual football on Saturday afternoon. He became a non‑playing football player, partly because of his injury issues but also because he could not get in the team on form. And here's the thing: he had no apparent issue with it.

The perception has grown that Owen is now so devoted to the horse-racing industry that football comes a poor second; not an afterthought, but certainly not the focus of the dreams that Dunphy once wrote about. There was something genuinely moving about that interview when Brown Panther, a horse he bred and owns, won the King George V Stakes at Royal Ascot and Owen was moved to tears. It was just difficult to associate this with the guy we see when it comes to the old day job. Football? "I certainly wouldn't take my kids to watch a match," he volunteered during a Twitter discussion with Joey Barton a few days ago. What precisely does he think would happen to them?

Sir Alex Ferguson decided in the end that Owen was surplus to requirements and, looking back, the only surprise was Owen being given a contract extension a year ago, when it was so obvious he had no substantial part to play. Owen has not started a league match since a goalless draw against Sunderland on 2 October 2010. He was substituted at half-time without having a shot. In fact, Owen made only one pass in the final third of the pitch, and that was a five‑yard pass backwards.

Every so often, there were flashes of the instinctive finishing that once made him so revered in his industry, and on each occasion it has prompted knee-jerk questions about whether he could still do a job for England. But the opposition was often Aldershot or Scunthorpe or Barnsley. Owen started only six league games for United, with a dozen others in cup competitions and 34 substitute appearances. There were 17 goals, which may not look too shabby, but seven came in the Carling Cup.

The first weekend of the 2010-11 season summed up Owen's three years at Old Trafford. Ferguson chose Wayne Rooney and Dimitar Berbatov to play up front against Newcastle United. The new signing, Javier Hernández, was among the substitutes, as was Federico Macheda, 18 at the time. All that summer spent getting into shape, plus the added incentive of facing his former club, and Owen watched the game in his blazer and tie. At the end of that season, when he was on the bench for the Champions League final ahead of Berbatov, it became one of the great team-selection controversies of Ferguson's quarter of a century in Manchester.

Perhaps the phone will ring in the next two weeks. Stoke could conceivably offer a workplace, provided they can move out some players first. There are people at the club who are not fully convinced Owen would fit in with the Tony Pulis ethos but they did float a possible deal earlier in the summer.

Despite the lack of offers elsewhere, Owen's representatives wanted money more in keeping with a Manchester United player. Stoke applied common sense, proposing a relatively low basic salary with add-ons and bonuses related to how much he played, similar to Jonathan Woodgate's deal with the club. And who can blame them for being cautious? Owen's league starts, season by season, from 2006-07 read: three, 24, 21, five, one and zero.

Maybe Everton will come through, as Owen hopes. The alternative is that he cannot get fixed up and, from there, it is difficult to know what happens next.

Either way, it would be understandable if Owen is experiencing something this year that he has never known on the first day of the season before: insecurity. There was a time when he was more than a dreamer; he was the dream-maker. Now the party is starting and he is outside, nose pressed against the window, wondering what he is missing.

Call time on chummy blandness

At least the BBC is showing it isn't against the idea of shaking things up a little with its Match of the Day coverage, even if the appointment of Harry Redknapp and Mick McCarthy to the sofa hardly represents a huge change in direction.

As well as wanting to see the football, Match of the Day viewers might appreciate it if they could be offered some genuine insight and come away thinking, heaven knows, that they have actually learned something. For too long, what we have had is like listening to the kind of chummy blandness you might hear down the local Rotary Club, near to closing time.

The BBC showed during the Olympics that it can put on a great show, with interesting guests, proper research and real analysis. In comparison, Match of the Day has become lazy and set in its ways. Good punditry can be just as interesting as the actual football. Just look at the analysis Gary Neville and Graeme Souness offer on Sky, then compare it with the kind of cliquish silliness that makes it acceptable for Alan Shearer to admit not knowing anything about Hatem Ben Arfa.